Failure to Launch

The market for good image editing programs for Linux is pretty much saturated. Despite this, BrainDistrict has dared to launch two commercial programs: IFX-Supreme and PaintSupreme.

BrainDistrict, a company in Cologne, Germany, has released two commercial graphics programs: IFX-Supreme and PaintSupreme image editing tools, which are available for Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux.

However, during lab testing, the IFXSupreme program retired at an early stage because of a serious software bug (see the “KO in the First Round” box), and PaintSupreme turned out to be completely or nearly unusable on some distributions in the course of the tests. I’ll explain more in this article.

The U.S. is known for its patent friendliness. But a Supreme Court decision in 2008 overturned a patent application by Bernard L. Bilski and Rand A. Warsaw for a risk mitigation process. Now Red Hat is using the so-called Bilski case in support of software non-patentability.